TOP Leaders Initiative

High-tech has been Israel’s growth engine for the past 30 years, with hundreds of new startups created every year and dozens of mergers, IPOs and exits announced on an almost weekly basis. In the face of economic and health crises taking place around the world, Israeli tech companies keep on succeeding, helping the economy to weather difficult times and even to flourish. In recent years, with the success of marketing and sales connections made online, many Israeli companies are deciding to maintain their operations in Israel and grow their business by relying on local talent.

Talent is becoming a significant bottleneck for additional growth as only 9% of Israel’s workforce is part of the high-tech scene. Yet, this group is responsible for 25% of the income tax receipts of employees. In terms of equal access and opportunities, the Israeli high-tech sector is still an “exclusive club” populated by a majority of Jewish, male employees from the strong center of Israel. To address this important need of growing the high-tech sector, the new government in Israel recently defined a bold target of increasing the rate of qualified employees to 15% within a few years. Achieving such an ambitious goal will require a well-structured program, determined execution and highly effective collaboration.

The Trump Foundation’s work in secondary schools corresponds to this target. In high school, the pool of relevant talent has doubled to 15.5% (five unit mathematics graduates) in recent years in tandem with joint activity by government, the foundation and additional stakeholders. Almost half of the five-unit graduates in mathematics are female students and many are Arab or residents of the social periphery. In middle school, the percentage of enrollment in excellence classes in mathematics is still less than 9%, with mostly Jewish boys from the center who attend them and excel on the PISA mathematics test.

However, for this objective to be realized, starting from middle school and ending with employment in a high-tech company, there is a need for a wider perspective and greater collaboration. Systems, organizations and departments must work together and align their efforts around the shared goal. In government, the ministries of education, innovation, employment, defense, and finance should talk to each other. Schools, universities, municipalities, companies and civic society organizations must all find a common language and engage in joint discourse.

In order to assist this complex endeavor, it is proposed that the foundation seek a way to bring together top leaders of these systems. The idea is to create a professionally intimate environment that would encourage them to share knowledge and collaborate across organizational boundaries. They will meet to discuss their visions and motivation, to become familiar with each other’s thinking, to build trust and to plan together the shared steps that are required in order to get the ball rolling.

We are proposing a three-month planning process in order to examine the feasibility of creating such a group. The planning will be coordinated by Dr. Adi Koll, a PhD in law from Columbia University, former Knesset member and Dean of Students at Reichman University (formerly named IDC Herzliya). In the planning stage, Koll will identify the core group of leaders and interview them to explore their needs and expectations. She will work closely with the TOP15 initiative led by Sheatufim. She will also attempt to locate a hosting organization for the group; initial thinking is about MAOZ and Reichman University as possibilities. She will then prepare a detailed plan to be presented and discussed by the Board of Directors.

* The text  above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation’s Board of Directors / Grant 455